Artists: John Clang – Being Together

Thanks to Dawn Langly for remembering John Clang for me – I  was certain I’d kept a record of this work but couldn’t find it. I wanted to send it on to a group of people I have been working with via Pic London, as technology will be integral to how we are able to keep in touch, in much the same way I do with various OCA people.

Clang writes on his site “In this series, ” webcam was used to do live recording of my family in Singapore. The recording was then transmitted via Skype to New York City and projected onto my living space. This is how families, dis(membered) through time and space, can be re(membered) and made whole again through the use of a third space, a site that is able to reassemble them together within the photographic space that we call a family portrait.” (2010)

clangart.com/artwork/beingtogether.html

I am reminded of Virilio’s comments/arguments about the perils of making it possible to put time and space on top of each other in this way.

“Speed is violence” (45)

“The obscenity of technology” (46)

Virilio also speaks of heading towards worldwide consciousness. “the fragmentation of historical reality is the dawn(were still being metaphorical) of an identity, a worldwide consciousness.” (50)

(I was minded to think about Santiago’s theory of cognition and what Virilio might have made it – however, the idea of worldwide conscious consciousness, as I think Virilio describes, is rather different from the idea of Santiago’s theory of cognition. COgnition and consciousness are not the same thing at all. Although they do appear to be related. We, humans, have a symbolic system into which we can pour our cognition – thereby construct ideas and express ourselves. it distances us from our basest cognitive activities (unconscious drives))

“Living systems are cognitive systems, and living as a process is a process of cognition. This statement is valid for all organisms, with or without a nervous system”. This can be applied to the smallest system to the largest – i.e. the entire universe.)

I have written NB next to the following in my copy of Virilio’s Pure War (2008)

“At the same time it’s the death of intimacy. All the reflection of these last years on an exploded ‘schizophrenic’ model of subjectivity corresponds to the great aesthetic of the collage. The ego is not continuous, it’s made up of a series of little deaths and partial identities which don’t come back together; or which only manage to come back to together by paying the price of anxiety” (51)

Ref:

Virillio P & Lotringer S, 2008 Pure War, Pasadena CA, Semiotext(e)